PaulineQuick wrote:What a mess! A private owned insurance company forcing a whole district to change it's car parking charging stratedgy. The only winner will be Westwood Cross.
Incorrect. This is the reason for charging for Sunday parking immediately surrounding the St James site. There would be NO CHANGE to the 'free' Sunday parking in the rest of Dover.
Deal, for example, is a totally different matter. At last night's meeting it was suggested that Deal's car parks near the town centre are close to capacity capacity on Sundays as is backed by traffic surveys and anecdotally that some people (DFLs? Shop workers?) are parked up in them all day actually stopping would-be shoppers parking and shopping.
IF this is the case then Sunday parking charges are a sensible solution. HOWEVER we have had no figures to show this. Officers have been asked to look at 'churn' i.e. movements in and out of car park over time which should provide a metric for how long different people are actually parked up.
It's only when a problem has actually been identified and measured that one can even begin looking for a solution.
We would all like a 'free' space outside our house, where we go to work, where we shop, when we visit people in hospital and so on. We are dealing with finite supply (spaces) and a growing demand (cars) so some sort of rationing is inevitable in some places at some times.
